Four Noble Truths (First Truth)

I thought that I would write a bit on the four noble truths. What they are, and where they lead. What are the four noble truths:

1) The truth of suffering/dukkha:

The truth of suffering or dukkha, is about how we have suffering in our life. It talks about the four things that are suffering. These are birth, aging, sickness and death. While these are maybe not the only things which are suffering, but these are considered to be the big ones.

Birth is a beautiful process. How can birth be suffering? It's a beautiful process of bringing a new being into the world. Now while I know that there is a lot more that can be said about what I will be saying here. I invite people to comment, and bring more content to this, I would like to put my understanding of this here. So here I go, stepping further into this.

How is birth suffering. If you look at the birthing process you see that there is a lot of pain involved. The mother in birthing her child is in a great deal of pain through the process. I really have no idea what this is like, I've never given birth, and I have no recollection of my births in this life or previous lives. So, we see that for the mother birth is a painful experience. But I don't believe that this is totally what Buddha Sakyamuni meant when he talked of birth being suffering. What I believe that he was talking about is the way that the baby is pulled from a very safe, and very protected space into the cold and cruel world. Can you imagine what it is like to be brought into this world? This feels like it must be a really strong sense of suffering or dukkha (which I need to go into in more detail at another point I think). So this is indeed suffering.

The second way we suffer is through aging. This is often translated as old age, but it appears that Buddha was talking more about aging than old age. Now I may be jumping on something that is not really there, but from what I am seeing Buddha was talking about the processes more so than the event. So what he is talking about in regards to aging is the process of getting older that starts at conception, and may even start prior to conception from the Buddhist perspective. The entire process of getting closer to death. Hm, that takes us to the forth of these ways of suffering. Now, I'm not being as careful with my language as maybe I should be to explain these. There are a lot of layers of subtlety to all the teachings of the Buddha. All dharma is interconnected. While there are certain specific teachings of the Buddha, all interconnect on such high levels that all teachings are contained in any single teaching. Or so I've been told.

So, the basic understanding of how aging is suffering is that we are constantly aware that we are moving towards the end of this life. Maybe at this point I should look at the concept of many lives. I'm not really sure that I understand this. As I understand it though is that we are born, we become older, we get sick, and we die. Then we go through this again. Until we have 1) obtained enlightenment, and 2) have chosen to no longer be re-born. There may be other factors involved as well. So that's sort of how I understand it. Re-birth is something that I have a lot of difficulty understanding. Strangely it makes a lot of sense to me.

After aging, we get to sickness. This I think you can all see as a form of suffering. Your sick, you're laying around, not doing much of anything, just don't feel like doing anything, you want to die, and well you think you are going to die. That's sickness. And that's suffering. Mind you, some have even questioned that. But they had to stretch to do that.

And well, I'm going to cut this short by putting in at this point the finial of the first truth, and that's death. No ... OK I was going to say "No one wants to die". The thing is people do want to die. People intentionally take their own lives. They intend to do precisely that. Some even do so when they are in a situation where doing precisely that is very difficult. But most people don't want to die except in extenuating circumstances. The thing is, death is not really just a single event. Or a single "point in time" event. It starts with getting closer and closer to death (the point that the body ceases to function) and continues through what we call death into the bardo (the time in between one life and the next life). Death is a very confusing state, and I would think incredibly scary. This whole process must be incredibly painful. We work so hard to avoid it. Some times we will "avoid" it through extraordinary means because we are really so scared of death that we just are not willing to let ourselves choose to be "responsible" for the death of another, when we can stave off death through respirators and artificial hearts and things like that. We know death is scary. We're scared of it now. But we have to move forward and start living now, not in the past and future of hope and fear.

So I'll leave it there. I know I meant to write more. It just seems that sometimes these things need to be allowed to go in the direction that they want to go. So I touched on the first of the four noble truths. I'll probably be putting the second up within a week. And now, I have even more directions to go from here.

Jigme Datse/Fearless Crescent Moon

Live Journal Post/Poll

Anyone can participate in the poll/post that I have put up for putting Buddhist topics up as to what people would like to hear about. The post is available at http://jrasku.livejournal.com/13099.html, or you could just look at http://jrasku.livejournal.com/ to read my whole journal. Please put your responses to the poll in there. Thanks so much for your time. Hope to be posting on my first topic in a week or less.

Jigme Datse

Topic ideas

I'm putting this as the first post for ideas for what to write about. I know that I could just write this down somewhere for my own ideas, or whatever, but this way, I might actually get some ideas as to what other people might like to see in the blog. I'm going to start with some core teachings I think. Work with them, and expand out from there. Here are the ideas I have right now:

three jewels
four foundations of mindfullness
taking refuge
five buddha families

Thats just 4 ideas. I'll post more later, and expand these out possibly to multiple posts.

Jigme Datse